The change affects both Facebook’s Android and iOS mobile applications and was actually announced by Facebook’s creator Mark Zuckerberg last November. The shift is part of Facebook’s plan to make its various mobile apps more important to its user base.

“The other thing that we’re doing with Messenger is making it so once you have the standalone Messenger app, we are actually taking messaging out of the main Facebook app. And the reason why we’re doing that is we found that having it as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that,” said Zuckerberg during a press conference back in November.

According to Facebook, users receive messages as much as 20 per cent faster on Messenger than they do in the main Facebook application.

While I can’t confirm that this specific statistic is accurate, opening conversations and replying to/receiving messages does seem to be much faster through Facebook’s dedicated Messenger mobile application. The company plans to notify users about the change before yanking the main Facebook app’s chat capabilities.

For me Facebook chat has replaced texting and I often contact friends and family via the platform. Facebook acquired competing mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19-billion earlier this year but has said that the platform will continue to operate separately, much like when the company purchased Instagram.

As usual expect this change to be very unpopular so a barrage of the usual, “I hate Facebook so much,” comments will probably soon flood both your Twitter and Facebook feed.